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As Hillary Clinton begins her final charge for the White House, her advisers are already recommending air strikes and other new military measures against the Assad regime in Syria. The clear signals of Clinton’s readiness to go to war appears to be aimed at influencing the course of the war in Syria as well as Pindosi policy over the remaining six months of the Obama administration. She also may be hoping to corral the votes of Republican neocons concerned about Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. Last month, the think tank run by Michele Flournoy, the former DoD official considered to be most likely to be Clinton’s choice to be Sec Def, explicitly called for “limited military strikes” against the Assad regime. And earlier this month Leon Panetta, former Sec Def & DCI, who has been advising Clinton, declared in an interview that the next president would have to increase the number of SOF and carry out air strikes to help “moderate” groups against Assad. When Panetta gave a belligerent speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, he was interrupted by chants from the delegates on the floor of:

No more war!

Flournoy co-founded the Center for New Pindosi Security (CNAS) in 2007 to promote support for Pindo war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then became Under Sec Def for Policy in the Obama administration in 2009. Flournoy left her Pentagon position in 2012 and returned to CNAS as CEO. She has been described by ultimate insider journalist David Ignatius of the WaPo, as being on a “short, short list” for the job Sec Def in a Clinton administration. Last month, CNAS published a report of a “Study Group” on military policy in Syria on the eve of the organization’s annual conference. Ostensibly focused on how to defeat Daesh, the report recommends new Pindo military actions against the Assad regime. Flournoy chaired the task force, along with CNAS president Richard Fontaine, and publicly embraced its main policy recommendation in remarks at the conference. She called for “using limited military coercion” to help support the forces seeking to force Assad from power, in part by creating a “no bombing” zone over those areas in which the opposition groups backed by Pindostan could operate safely. In an interview with Defense One, Flournoy described the no-bomb zone as saying to the Russian and Syrian governments:

If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets (in order to) stop the bombing of certain civilian populations.

In a letter to the editor of Defense One, Flournoy denied having advocated “putting U.S. combat troops on the ground to take territory from Assad’s forces or remove Assad from power,” which she said the title and content of the article had suggested. But she confirmed that she had argued:

Pindostan should under some circumstances consider using limited military coercion, primarily strikes using standoff weapons, to retaliate against Syrian military targets and to set more favourable conditions on the ground for a negotiated political settlement.

The proposal for a “no bombing zone” has clearly replaced the “no fly zone” which Clinton has repeatedly supported in the past as the slogan to cover a much broader Pindo military role in Syria. Panetta served as Sec Def and DCI in the Obama administration when Clinton was Sec State, and was Clinton’s ally on Syria policy. On Jul 17, he gave an interview to CBS News in which he called for steps that partly complemented and partly paralleled the recommendations in the CNAS paper. Panetta said:

I think the likelihood is that the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground to try to assist those moderate forces that are taking on ISIS and that are taking on Assad’s forces.

Panetta was deliberately conflating two different issues in supporting more Pindo SOF in Syria. The existing military mission for those forces is to support the anti-ISIS forces made up overwhelmingly of the Kurdish YPG and a few opposition groups. Neither the Kurds nor the opposition groups the Special Forces are supporting are fighting against the Assad regime. What Panetta presented as a need only for additional personnel is in fact a completely new mission for Pindo SOF of putting military pressure on the Assad regime. He also called for increasing “strikes” in order to “put increasing pressure on ISIS but also on Assad.” That wording, which jibes with the Flournoy-CNAS recommendation, again conflates two entirely different strategic programs as a single program.

The Panetta ploys in confusing two separate policy issues reflects the reality that the majority of the Pindosi public strongly supports doing more militarily to defeat ISIS but has been opposed to Pindosi war against the government in Syria. A poll taken last spring showed 57% in favour of a more aggressive Pindo military force against ISIS. The last time public opinion was surveyed on the issue of war against the Assad regime, however, was in Sep 2013, just as Congress was about to vote on authorizing such a strike. At that time, 55% to 77% of those surveyed opposed the use of military force against the Syrian regime, depending on whether Congress voted to authorize such a strike or to oppose it.

It is highly unusual if not unprecedented for figures known to be close to a presidential candidate to make public recommendations for new and broader war abroad. The fact that such explicit plans for military strikes against the Assad regime were aired so openly soon after Clinton had clinched the nomination suggests that Clinton had encouraged Flournoy and Panetta to do so. The rationale for doing so is evidently not to strengthen her public support at home but to shape the policy decisions made by the Obama administration and the coalition of external supporters of the armed opposition to Assad. Obama’s refusal to threaten to use military force on behalf of the anti-Assad forces or to step up military assistance to them has provoked a series of leaks to the news media by unnamed officials, primarily from the Pentagon, criticizing Obama’s willingness to cooperate with Russia in seeking a Syrian ceasefire and political settlement as “naïve.”

The news of Clinton’s advisers calling openly for military measures signals to those critics in the administration to continue to push for a more aggressive policy on the premise that she will do just that as president. Even more important to Clinton and close associates, however, is the hope of encouraging Turks. Toads & and Qataris, which have been supporting the armed opposition to Assad, to persist in and even intensify their efforts in the face of the prospect of Pindo-Russian cooperation in Syria. Even before the recommendations were revealed, specialists on Syria in Faschingstein were already observing signs that Toads and Thanis were waiting for the Obama administration to end in the hope that Clinton would be elected and take a more activist role in the war against Assad. The new Prime Minister of Turkey, Binali Yildirim, however, made a statement on Jul 13 suggesting that Erdogan may be considering a deal with Russia and the Assad regime at the expense of both Syrian Kurds and the anti-Assad opposition. That certainly would have alarmed Clinton’s advisers, and four days later, Panetta made his comments on network television about what “the next president” would have to do in Syria.